THE

TRAVELLING MENAGERIE.

CHAPTER I.

BABY GRIMSTONE IS BORN.

THE

HE event of the year had come round in Ryecester. Even Fifth of November Night (although the generally sleepy and well-behaved old town always ran riot on that night more fiercely even than at election times, sometimes getting so outrageous that special constables had to be sworn in, and soldiers sent for), even Fifth of November was a second-rate annual holiday in Ryecester's opinion in comparison with its great autumn Hog, Hop, and Cheese Fair.

A

The business fair lasted for four days, and was followed by a pleasure fair, which, although professedly confined to the final fifth day, began in a straggling way the week before the business fair began, and lingered on in a straggling way to the end of the week after the business fair had finished.

The fair was in full swing. The old-fashioned bow-windowed inns of Ryecester, with their deep, narrow, galleried yards, which used to be so bustling in the old coaching and posting times, but which are generally so catacomb-like now, since Ryecester is no longer on the highroad to anywhere, but only the terminus of a branch railway which runs on an average about three up and a couple of down trains per diem-the old inns, again crowded during fair week, had thrown off for awhile their gloom.

Both the footpaths and roadway of Ryecester High Street were thronged, and the elm-shaded Fair Field, stretching along the green, slowly

flowing Rye, was dotted with cromlech-like piles of cheese, fragrant with the scent of samples and pockets of hops, and-well, not so fragrant with the odours of penfuls of white, and black, and pink, and plum-pudding pigs.

The pleasure-fair department was fast opening into the glory into which it would fully blossom on its own particular day. The booths that sold gilt gingerbread, and sweeties, and dolls, and panniered donkeys, and penny trumpets, and sixpenny workboxes, and all kinds of cheap gimcracks, were open in long avenues. The waxwork show was open, and so were the peep-shows, and the roulettebooths. The Fat Lady, the Giant, the Dwarf, the Strong Man, the Five-legged Calf, the Dancing Dogs, and the Embalmed Head of a New Zealand Chief, had begun, or were about to begin, to take money. Cheap Jacks were bellowing in rivalry from the stages in front of their locomotive warehouses. Men and women were carrying about dangling rows of children's penny watches, plaster

birds and butterflies fluttering up or down as the elastic that suspended them was twitched, and trayfuls of sham gold wedding rings, and equally genuine "for one penny only, real goolden sovruns sellin' for a wager." The German bandsmen and the Ethiopian serenaders, Silly Billy, the acrobats, and the photographers' touts, were all hard at work. Punch was giving an early performance. The youth of the town and neighbourhood had already begun to patronise swings and merry-gorounds, to shy at cocoa-nuts and shoot for Spanish nuts, to wear false noses, and make the people in front of them believe that their coats were split from collar to waist by drawing strident rattles down their backs.

It was plain that the jollity of the fair, as the clown of its wandering theatre said of his house's, or rather tent's, performances, was "jest a'-goin' to begin;" but not until the eve of Pleasure Fair Day proper did Ryecester consider that the pleasure fair was really open.

For years Jollyman's Menagerie had been in the habit of arriving in Ryecester on the day before its Pleasure Fair Day, in time to build up for an exhibition on the evening of the day on which it reached the old town. For a day or two Jollyman's agent had been in Ryecester; a dark-eyed, waxy-moustached, tall man, who was vaguely supposed to "have been in the army" by the youngsters and maid-servants of Ryecester.

Jollyman's bills, V.R.-headed lanky oblongs of emphatically-bloated big red and black capitals and partially illegible blurred small type-something like the ink-marks on a blotting-pad-were pasted on every dead wall, and displayed in every public house and almost every other shop in Ryecester.

Jollyman's Menagerie was far too big an affair to rub shoulders with the common caravans of the Fair Field. There was no space on the crowded Fair Field that could be turned into a caravanserai for such a caravan of caravans as the menagerie. Year after year, Jollyman announced, as if smitten